Tribute to Coraline Emberly
by WhispersofBliss
Summary: Crystalline Emberly finds it difficult to say goodbye to her sister Coraline, a tribute lost to the 60th Hunger Games. This is an aftermath oneshot of what happens in District 10 after Sparrowcries's Lost in the Darkness SYOT.


**This is what happens in District Ten after SparrowCries's Lost in the Darkness SYOT Hunger Games. Coraline Emberly's last sister Crystalline's POV**

The bundle of flowers I am holding is half my height, double my weight. But I hold on. For her.

The cemetery is up a little green hill, where there used to be dead branches and wilted flowers and wolves that came and sniffed the bones at night. Now there is a fence and the flowers are nice and neat and the trees trimmed and healthy. No more dead life littered helplessly on the ground.

I bury my face helplessly into the flowers, trying to muffle the sounds of my sobs. Even if I am successful, the tears come pouring down like spring rain. I cry harder. For her. That's what she used to say.

When the wooden box came from the Capitol, my mother and I couldn't bear to touch it. It was too depressing, too horrifying, too precious for our embrace. Then one creepy day we took her out and she was all prude and perfect and we cried until we could no more. Coraline was the closest of my sisters and now she had to be taken from me too. I clung to Mother from now on. We only have each other, but that is enough. I will never marry. I will stay an Emberly forever.

We sold our horses, Mother and I. We couldn't bear the sight of them. After all, riders on horses are what got her in the end. We sold our cows, too. Cows were her favorite animals and she used to spend hours stroking and milking and singing to them.

But we sometimes left entrails for the wolves that come at night. Because he saved her, more than once, giving up his own life. And we know she is very grateful for it. And so are we.

I open the little white fence gate and step in. It's not too big nor too small and of course very clean. A few mice have made nests but they don't bother us and we don't bother them. If they touch the graves, though, they're dead mice. First of all I bowed respectfully to Father, but I do not place a single flower for him. If he had never done what he did, perhaps my sisters would still be here with me right now. Laughing faces, twinkling eyes, chummy long hair. How I missed their laughter, their joy. Their presence.

I move on to Rosaline's stone. She gets one for telling me about our father in the Justice Building before I had a chance to react, before I never saw her again in real life. It's a red rose to honor her beauty and her beautiful name and what love she brought. When I think of her, I thought of loyalty and maturity. She was a second mother to me in her short time.

For her independence and spirit, Aveline gets a daffodil, yellow as her hair, beautiful as her will. She brought hope to us and always had a talent of making our family crack up in delight.

Caroline gets edelweiss for being the bravest out of all the sisters and daring to take the first step when no one else would. She had a love for adventure in her life.

Hannelle was a complete sweetheart, an unselfish darling who was an honest vegetarian. She loved plants and animals and saw the world around her with a pure, gentle heart, with no greater desire than to have a happy family. For that I left a bundle of baby's breath into front of her stone and sprinkled rose petals over the slab.

I finally come to the last one, musing the fact that either she would be here or I would. I leave the rest of the bundle of flowers near her stone and hug it, whispering to it, singing a prayer. Once it is covered with my tears like puddles in pouring rain do I finally stand up with stiff legs. I gaze at my district below, with its wide open greens and red farm buildings. I enjoy the moment before I finally get to work. My fingers groped for the picnic basket I had left yesterday and I greedily go through its contents-two pearly turquoise buttons, a pincushion strawberry, some of her old childhood clothes, piles of straw, and a whole bunch of cut up, loose, very messy fabric a shade of mousy brown.

I must've spent hours there but once the scarecrow is finished I admired my hard work. Coraline is smiling again and I can't help but allow myself to grin at her, the first grin I've grinned in weeks. Months. It only lasts for a second, though, because like the atmosphere in the Hunger Games my grin quickly fades and my face starts to rain until my world is flooded with misery.

I had done all I could for her. And it was never enough in the end.

But every single memory we have, good or bad, rests safely within me. And it will forever. For her. And for me.

For us.

* * *

**Third Person POV**

****Crystalline Emberly stuck true to her word and never married in her life. She and her mother became the best of friends and they depended on each other to spend their days. They also became good friends with Morning Glory and Charity Dusk. When her mother eventually died, Crystalline became one of the most successful animal traders in the entire District. She made a few very close friends and lived quietly but contently until her peaceful death. Unfortunately, since Crystalline had no children, that was the last of the Emberly family line. The Emberly's went extinct in Panem.


End file.
